Are players leaving?

[Raspen]

The other (happened before the first point) was the posting of all WB bonuses on the Wiki but not posting all other secret clans at the same time. Definitely felt that was out of line. If you are going to do the freedom of information no probs, just put every clan out there. I really would like to know some secrets of BTs, Kin, or some of the juicer dark gifts out there but alas its not for my eyes. And there was also something in there I hadn't realized and really wished I had the opportunity to find out for myself... From my perspective, it seemed you had an axe to grind and again for no reason I was aware of and more importantly how did you get the information? It was escalated to immortals and noted it was not appropriate to post clan information. Again, from my point, I believe this skewed your view of the staff and wb clan members.

You accused me of posting the wolfbrother information. I did not...
You accuse me of violating my Fandom Admin responsibilities and you don't even know what they are...
I do not have the "secret" information of any clan, nor have I posted any....
I didn't have the information, it was posted years before I join the wiki and 6+ years before someone tried to delete it...
This entire experience did color my view of wb clan members due to their poor treatment of me...
This did not skew my view of staff because staff was never involved in any of this... at any time...

Your entire post above is fiction. And it is exactly for false narratives like this that I am leaving this community.

You may not have realized it at the time but when you reloaded the information you did in fact post the information. Especially since you were reviewing the content before reloading. The exact issue is not about providing a service to the community as a whole, which is commendable, the issue is when dealing with private/sensitive information. The information itself had parts wrong, parts very true, and omitted parts. Members of the WB clan did in fact reach out to you directly with these issues as a concern. I also understand the discussions were cordial in the beginning but at some point there was disagreements on how to approach the issue occurred. This is an important point because it was not some folks randomly attacking Taziar who was only doing a thankless job. There were legitimate concerns which were being raised around sensitive information, consistency of usage across the site, the role of the wiki admin vs staff ( when compared with WOTMUD itself given the wiki derives its name and purpose from the site) which resulted in a break down.

And as far as the folks deleting out the information without being signed in, 100% with you on that. Deletion of data should be noted by the user name in system with the appropriate timestamp and reasoning. I'm sure the overall sentiment was agreed upon on the deletion of data by unknown users. Glad those settings were modified.

Providing time stamps and information on something that was brought up is not concerning. You’re trying to create a narrative. The narrative is nonsense. All of the information such as IP are apparently public. Wolfbro bonuses are public knowledge. Just as every other clan with bonuses is public knowledge. As they should be. Don’t allow bias to stand in the way of reason. - Disagree with this because if it were true it should be 100% across all clans. List them all or don't list any. That was my original stance. If the game itself has mechanisms which hides membership (view clan black talon, wb, kin, etc.) then clearly it isn't intended to be open.

I think what’s more interesting is that in an earlier post you labeled bandwagoning, aggression towards other players, and specific examples of things such as using the rl names of some of our members, as harassment. Which is true. The punishments you listed that should have taken place are also fair and correct.

Yet when Taziar faced aggressive attacks on his character, rl and in game and other forms of harassment, he was asking for it? I don’t know how else to take your posts other than that way. He brought it on himself because he did something that you’ve labeled as not ok basically.

- Not sure this makes sense. In game Taziar went after wolves, named them friends of the dark, named those who ran with wolves as darkfriends and not to be allowed in Cair. This was all in quick succession. That's the part I know. I don't think you can say attacks on your in game character aren't warranted given those actions. Unaware of anything else in character. What were the other points in character that were felt as harassment? Honestly I didn't give the guy any thought until those actions and not much shortly afterward. Just struck me as odd at how out of the blue it was when it happened.

Implying harassment is acceptable is distasteful. Debating and arguing points on an issue is fair. Were there specific instances of harassment which were not addressed? Personal attacks? What were the specifics? And throw the book at them if they are seen not following the house guest or any other rules.



Now I understand you next said to report them. Good on you. But as you yourself noticed, in a way, wouldn’t matter if he did.

You are all hypocrites man. Make no mistake. I don’t care what “click” you’re involved with. You point your fingers at one another but you’re no different from one another. Not really. Now understand this isn’t necessarily aimed at you, Raspen, I’m talking to a wider audience. All of them have heard from me and been told this before, but still. It’s worth saying again.

Grow up. Build bridges not walls.

[Raspen]

I started to make a run on both of them to rank 8 (oh how I wish I took scalps for all those years after mastering) as I was excited by the rank 8 zone sense. With this removed, I dont see rank 8 as valuable for me (I understand that others may find r8 valuable) - for me it is not worth the effort.

With the limited play time available to me, if I cant progress these chars to something that I find worthwhile, then why play them? I also dont find Achillies or Badd fun to play at all anymore - I am quite annoyed that they have been nerfed, nerfing what I had worked for (in terms of postures). The removal of zerk attack makes Achillies feel 20% as powerful as he was, reduction in master stab (despite it being an error in a calc) is also frustrating on Badd. You cant take things away from characters that they have had for years and expect them to still enjoy the character as much as they did when they had the thing that was taken away. I am actually resentful every time I log onto Achillies - so I just dont do it?

Same concerns were raised by Ghast which was more specific to a class rather than over all changes. Same impact it looks. Absolutely am empathetic to these issues and has to be understood with every reduction in an ability there will be a reduction in play time with those character types. And if it is a main may result in less to no playing time for that person.

Its a regurgitation of your statement but it really rings true. The balance between the good of the game versus impact to individual players.

[Fermin]

Warrior attack was the best addition since I've played and losing it is a bummer. That rug pull on such a big portion of the fun pker type mindset still doesn't make sense to me. All the following 'balance' changes are in part a way to try to bring back that chaotic variety that was lost.

Coming back to a game I feel I know extremely well and being lost in zones I have pk'd in for hundreds of hours feels terrible, I'm not going to relearn my spams from FD to commander and everytime I get that "alas" I go from wanting to go pk to being extremely cautious.

Losing rank 8 where means I should have put all that pk time into another character in a better clan.

Losing all the stats on dodge gear means I should play a channeler if I want to have top stats (or again another character in a better clan).

Losing posture parry and everyone else getting more OB means you have to play carefully (or again another character in a better setup).

All these changes where I 'lost' stuff feel like they stem from that loss of attack on warriors, because they kind of make sense. Doesn't feel good though. My warrior characters were about my 4th favorite characters to play but they were geared and ready to die and I really got a lot of fun playing them to the death.

I do think there is probably a pretty good reason most games inflate other things to create balance instead of nerfing.

[myzec]

The reason I started playing again was because of warrior attack. Man was that fun to play and play against. Still miss it.

[Davor]

Do fades still have attack? Should probably remove that and give it back to warriors - down abs again.

[Atienne]

I don't know why I ever play or not play really.

I have this thing where I get really into a game for a time. Then I lose interest, and do something else. I was playing WoTMUD for awhile. I was working on getting an Aes Sedai. I accomplished that goal, then played a little more. "Oh, that's neat." I already have several masters and a fade, so I wasn't really interested in PKing/RPing to master the Aes Sedai. It's the treacherous goal-oriented mindset. You reach the goal, and if you don't have another goal, you stop playing.

What am I doing now? Well Curtis and I are playing WOW Classic SoM so that's really the only game I'm playing right now. Even that is getting boring for me, and I want to quit, but I'm just raidlogging now for the guild. My new thing is the Harley I just bought a month ago. If the weather's nice, if I'm not working, if I'm not raiding, if I'm not doing something with the family, then I'm out riding around.

Seeing all the changes is pretty wild. Stuff that might have been NWIH list back in the day being done. I think a lot of the changes are good, in theory. Remember, I haven't really played with them. There are some unintended consequences, too. Like I saw the thing with mobs patrolling strangely because they can move through those rooms now. Stuff like that. You can't always ascertain every result of a change. It's good that's it is being watched and adjusted, or otherwise fixed. I do believe that too much change at one time can be a bad thing. Maybe that's a relic of when I used to mod my car. If you change too many things at once and something bad happens, it makes it harder to diagnose which change caused the problem, as you had a bunch of stuff taken off around the same time. I think that can certainly translate to the game.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but I am also a fan of reverting to a state of the game where it was many many years ago. Everyone has top end equipment now, everyone is a master, etc. A playerfile wipe would just kill the game, but it would be interesting (and there would certainly be more death and destruction) if everyone wasn't running around in top end sets. Equipment availability is just insane now. I know this would never happen, but a giant fight with people in leather and chainmail with guard weapons might be fun again. I don't know.

Anyway, I am sure we will come back and play again at some point, but it's not right now.

[toshiro]

I've disliked SS pk since about 2008. I left when the side died and I was unsuccessful at statting and lvling a LS hunter. I came back briefly when SS was made LS, and left after it was reverted. I came back during covid b/c of the show, and seeing the homeland statistics on the wiki showed me I could stat an awesome combo warrior with zerk attack relatively quicky. I was going through the clanning process when zerk attack was removed, and I decided to try some other stuff.

I started playing Toshiro again because I like SS RP, and I found ways to do things solo as I learned more about the game. When I came back, I had ~900 qps from pk, and I set a goal to PVE to R7, then consider R8. Dailies are slow, but Shinji and I found ways to do some bigger objectives with low numbers.

We would get a captains hat, sail into a city. I'd go in in full dodge and stab all the palace guards, slink back to the boat to heal, put on abs and grab our projectiles, and head back into the palace to kill a cityhead. Palace alarms and city alarms would go off like crazy, and we were always on edge trying not to get trapped in the doors. It felt risky (e.g., exciting) and it had a good payoff. It definitely felt riskier than having a DL gate us in with a full group and smash, and it was available to anyone who wanted to farm up the gear and commit the pracs to it. It felt RPish for a rogue/scout on SS to sneak in, learn the palace, and assassinate a city head. But, we were signaling (via alarms) that some dung was going down, and nobody ever followed up on it. So, rather than it be a draw for LS to defend their city and generate some RP-based pk (player laziness), the ability to assassinate city heads was removed entirely.

Once I calculated it out, we were generating ~25 tps a hit, twice a day. So ~50 tps a day, 10 days to hit 500 tps if we didn't die, which we could turn into 30 qps. At that pace, 30 qps per 10 days, it's still a pretty long grind to r8 doing it the PVE way. That's assuming we weren't eventually interrupted and forced into a pk battle. It was really more of a supplement for when SS pk was dead. So dailies got nerfed, projectiles got nerfed, baerlon got upped (thus flipped less often). Now my ability to tick slowly away towards a goal has been made completely reliant on other people's playtime, and the amount of time needed to reach it has increased dramatically. I need people to either log ss in large numbers to PvE, or I need people to come to the SW to pk (which, see my opening line).

I'm not really here to discuss the merits of high reward solo activities, and whether or not they deserve to be upped/nerfed. My playtime is based upon the following process: find an interesting objective, figure out the steps to achieve it, determine the time it would take to execute those steps, and decide if the process is fun enough to pursue the goal. Generally, I see a six-twelve month horizon of active, daily play, as my limit for most objectives on this game. Longer than that, I won't pursue it. If I can't put an upper bound on how long it will take (e.g., 3 qps per day doing dailies to master is the time cap), or if an objective requires me to organize things on discord, I won't pursue it. When I have a plan to fall within this time frame and it gets extended into the 12-36 month range due to changes, then I'll move on to another objective.

I wouldn't consider it entirely lost time, because I still had fun figuring out how to do the thing, and enjoying the process to work towards it. Some of those moments are my best memories on the mud. But, after a major change I have to figure out new things to do that fit my playstyle and goals. It's still sad to be interrupted halfway through a 6-12 month goal, and realize you've got double the work to do and/or the work is less fun. I've toyed with the idea of leaving, and I've toyed with the idea of finally giving Tosh up. I'm closer to the latter than the former, because I still like northern pk. So, I've been logging on LS/DS a bit more often now that Shinji has hit R8. Ultimately, PVE pursuits have been a way for me to regear my dead alts that I pk on, introduce newer players to mechanics/ways to gear up, and add to the depth of experience on top of a great pk experience. However, I think the time I'm willing to invest is often lower than the imms/playerbase think should be required to achieve certain goals.

That's fine, certain goals are meant to reward certain behavior. If the process isn't fun/fast enough to me, it isn't necessarily a bad process. I can still grab an abs kit out of chest on DS/LS and have fun dying valiantly blight. But, it's a more shallow experience and depends more heavily on the constant flux in the who list.

[Etain]

I wasn't going to make this post, but seeing other people express some of the same concerns that I have, as well as displaying some of the attitudes that I like least, convinced me that I should have my say. Before I start, I'd like to be clear that I'm not trying to attack or call out anyone. While I don't always get along well with people, I've got no personal issues with anyone here, nor do I really feel that I have enough knowledge about the game or the balancing to comment on the effects of the ongoing adjustments.

From day one, pretty much, I've been a casual player. I had goals, of course (I've outlined them elsewhere), but nothing out of the ordinary. WoTMUD was just a fun bit of escapism from the everyday grind, one that happened to be based on one of my favorite fantasy book series. It's also served as a makeshift social life. I'm a deeply introverted person, and, outside of work contacts and family, dealing with people has always been more stressful than anything else. MUDding let me connect with people in a lower-pressure fashion, and over time I've developed relationships here that have helped me through some really tight spots.

Last year, I spent the entire summer and fall, and well into the winter, extremely sick. To say that I almost died would be an exaggeration, but I'm not sure by how much; I certainly gained a new understanding of my mortality. During those months, I didn't have the energy to keep logging into WoTMUD, although I tried as much as possible to keep my lines of communication open.

I'm recovering slowly, but since I've been back, I haven't felt the same drive to play. I've taken breaks before, but this one seems to have highlighted some of the things that always bothered me. When I log in these days, I almost never leave rent unless someone needs something from me, and I find myself doing other things and forgetting that I'm even online.

One of the things that is the biggest turn-off right now is the sheer amount of complaining. I'm not going to pretend that there aren't things that need to be fixed, but the constant stream of negativity from the playerbase is draining and off-putting. There are still really positive, helpful people playing, but there are also quite vocal factions that push their grievances (admittedly, often legitimate) at every available opportunity. I've even left the WoTMUD Discord recently for the same reason; there's an enormous amount of wrangling over the same issues, and not a lot of it is constructive.

Another reason that I've backed away from WoTMUD is that there just aren't that many things left that I want to do. Smobbing used to be fun, but the period of time when DS and SS were given extra resources to locate smobbers/XPers meant that most trips turned into PK sessions, and I can't hold my own in PK. The low population makes it difficult to do any of the things that require groups, and over time quite a few of the options for solo play have either been nerfed heavily, or replaced with things like weapon crafting that require pieces of high-end gear and tokens that I have no way of acquiring. I know there are people who love those things, and to each their own, but I'm not one of them.

The one thing that's kept me connected to WoTMUD most strongly has been my activities and relationships in the White Tower. I've always loved interacting with novices and Accepted, teaching where I can, offering moral support, and being available to help them out with their progress. Lately, though, even that is beginning to pale. I'm a casual player, and as such, I don't always have the best grasp of game mechanics, or the overall world. The changes have been coming thick and fast lately, and it seems like moral support is about the only thing I've got left to offer. Most novices these days enter the Tower with as much practical knowledge as I have, often more, and the notion of my 'teaching' them just feels a bit hollow and silly.

Years ago, I used to play a couple of other games that, like this one, were based on things that I really enjoy. Over time, the developers began implementing reams of new changes to the base mechanics (sometimes reversing those changes within weeks), and the playerbases grew increasingly negative, and then toxic. I'd invested some money into those games, but in the end I walked away and closed my accounts for good. WoTMUD is still a good place, and by and large the community is still solid, but a lot of the people I knew and liked best have gone. It would be a sad day for me if I had to do the same, but I'm beginning to question how far out that day might be.

[Taziar]

Raspen,

I'm sorry you feel so betrayed by the community over this entire wolfbrother page debacle. I can relate with that. And I'm sorry that you don't understand how the wiki works... maybe that is mine and Thuvia's faults, maybe we didn't explain to the community and teach others enough. But honestly we were too busy building the structure so others could contribute.

If you don't contribute, you don't get a say. It's not mine or Thuvia's job to change or fix anything that someone dislikes or disagrees with. It is our job to facilitate contributions and protect the information as a historical reference. You, or anyone else, can say what you think our responsibilities are, or what you think we should do, or how information should be handled... but, in the end it isn't up to you.

I do know that you never talked to me about anything... ever. Except now, in your fictional account of how it all went down in this thread. Information verification is important, sadly you didn't verify yours before you posted it.

Good luck, and best wishes.

[Elyse]

Like several others, the "I'm 39 years old and have important real world obligations" thing is reason number 1 I'm not around much. 40 is fast approaching! But having read through this whole thread, I do feel like my long-term decision to minimize my participation in out-of-game/non-forum communication methods (dating back to the ICQ days) was a good one. For someone who has been around as long as I have, my knowledge of people's alts is astoundingly limited, which surely limits my potential to hold grudges, and not being on discord means far less drama. Certainly, the forums and chats show plenty of negativity at times, but I've been blissfully unaware of some of the deeper drama and interpersonal nastiness. Didn't realize things were that bad, and I am now kind of bummed.

--

Also, I wrote it in a private message back when Staff solicited nominations for the Legends list (did anything ever come of this?), and I'll say it very publicly now. Adael for Legend. He's so much to enrich enjoyment and playability of the mud for so many, all while being a class act!